Technical Advice for Oracle Tax and Utilities products

Friday Jul 26, 2013

The first product using Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.2.0.1.0 (a.k.a. FW4.2 Service Pack 1) has been released. Just to remind you all, Service packs for the OUAF are now released with service packs for individual products that are certified for the OUAF Service Pack. You cannot apply a OUAF service pack to a product not certified for the service pack.

OUAF V4.2.0.1.0 has the following features:

Oracle Service Bus Adapters - Adapters for Oracle Service Bus are available for Outbound Messages (and Notification Download Staging for older products). Refer to Oracle Service Bus Integration Oracle Utilities Application Framework (Doc Id: 1558279.1) available from My Oracle Support for more information.

Attachment Object Support in Email Adapter - The Attachment object can now be used as attachments in the Email Adapter. This extends the Email Adapter which previously used external files as attachments in emails.

Schema Designer - A new Schema Designer has been implemented that supports property sheets, drag and drop, UI Hint management, context menus etc. This will make schemas easier to build and maintain. The raw XML format is still supported as an alternative for developers who prefer this view.

Enhanced Schema Default and Currency Support - The schema mnemonics have been expanded to support enhanced defaulting and currencies. Defaults for formats and currencies can be set as installation defaults as well as overrides for particular business rules. This allows support for multiple currencies.

EAR Independence - Over the last few releases the configuration settings within the EAR file have been progressively been externalized to allow for independence to enhance support for clustering and cloud deployment. This release concludes the initiative to remove environment specific configuration from the EAR file (it can be included if desired) and externalized.

Accessibility Enhancements - As with other Oracle products, accessibility is assessed with each release and additional facilities are provided for accessibility. In this release, the behavior of tab stops on query zone headers, general tab stops and automatically generated title tags are configurable.

Miscellaneous Enhancements - A number of smaller enhancements have been implemented:

A new internal encryption/decryption algorithm has been implemented. This is largely internal but will be externalized in a future service pack.

Internal program names are now included in TKPROF traces for increased traceability.

Patching utilities have been updated to include enhanced lookup patching for product installations.

Automatic formatting can be disabled for numeric fields using the new alphaFormat schema attribute.

Over the next few weeks expect some interesting articles on specific changes with examples to illustrate the above features.

Thursday Jul 25, 2013

For OUAF products that support COBOL, to work with native, managed or clustered servers, the following additional setting must be appended to the Server Start Arguments, within the Oracle WebLogic console, for COBOL sockets to be used:

Linux/Unix

-Djava.library.path=<SPLEBASE>/runtime

Windows

-Djava.library.path=<SPLEBASE>\runtime

where <SPLEBASE> is the fully qualified path for the installation. This setting does not support environment variables.

This advice has been included in updated versions of the following whitepapers available from My Oracle Support:

Friday Jul 12, 2013

As with most whitepapers for our produts there is a regular set of updates performed every 6-8 months to take in new advice and new features in the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. A number of security related and integration whitepapers have been updated to reflect new and updated information:

Thursday Jul 11, 2013

One of the common questions I get from consultants, partners and customers is what other technology can we use with our Oracle Utilities Application Framework. Over the last few years we have progressively been adding more and more support for Oracle Technology to augment solutions.

Here is the current list of Oracle Technology which has been integrated with Oracle Utilities Application Framework:

About

Hi, I am Anthony Shorten, I am the Principal Product Manager for the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. I have been working for over 20+ years in the IT Business and am the author of many a technical whitepaper, manual and training material.
I am one of the product managers working on strategy and designs for the next generation of the technology used for the Utilities and Tax markets.
This blog is provided to announce new features, document tips and techniques and also outline features of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products.
These products include Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management, Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management and Oracle Public Service Revenue Management. I am the product manager for the Management Pack for these products.